Papers released since have all but completely cleared him of the charge, with the general academic consensus being that he was naïve in his friendships with some of his colleagues. Its historical importance is enhanced by the editing of Nigel West who, apart from decoding several obscure references to the secret war, persuaded the Security Service to break their rule of maintaining an agent's anonymity. He, Burgess, and Blunt were friends, and Liddell was very much a part of the hothouse wartime circle revolving around Victor Rothschild's 5 Bentinck Street flat, in which Burgess and Blunt both lived. Maybe that’s why they seem to have been stunned into inaction as evidenced by the Coldspur Sonia material demonstrates.

Almost every working day he would dictate an entry, often several pages long, to his secretary Margot Huggins, who would then type it up and lock it in the personal safe of MI5’s director general. He died of heart failure aged 66 in 1958 at his home, 18 Richmond Court, Sloane Street, London, and was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery. Despite her solid performance on the Krivitsky case, she was appointed supremo of the Regional Security Liaison Officers organisation in April 1940. They reveal a service close to collapse after expansion from 30 officers in 1939 to nearly 900 by 1941. He was obviously hoping he could trust these guys despite his concerns but that he was attracted to Blunt by his art background.WALLFLOWERS is the codename given to one of the Security Service’s most treasured possessions, the daily journal dictated from August 1939 to June 1945 by MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage, Guy Liddell, to his secretary, Margo Huggins. These include Sir Dick White, Philby's nemesis in both MI5 and MI6, both of which White headed, and Peter Wright (of Spycatcher fame), one of the most avid of all mole-hunters. Ben Macintyre describes the slow dawning of treachery described in the final volume of Liddell’s remarkable diaries. One can see from this (I've no doubt it's all genuine) Mr Liddle could not be seen as a slouch - or his assistant for that matter.

Guy Maynard Liddell, CB, CBE, MC (8 November 1892 – 3 December 1958) was a British intelligence officer. Hollis became deputy in 1953 and moved up in 1956 to be director general until his retirement, in 1965. She did not leave the intelligence world, but moved to SIS, so her behaviour cannot have been that subversive. He would not have been surprised that MI5, and Liddell in particular, would have taken such a stance against Communist subversion, especially when he (Attlee) learned about the activities of the Comintern a decade before. The document was considered so highly classified that it was retained in the safe of successive Directors-General, and special permission was required to read it.Historians now recognise that Liddell and Masterman effectively controlled the German espionage system in Britain without the Nazi regime ever finding out. The cracking of the German Enigma code meant that each agent could be tracked to check the misinformation was believed. Early entries paint a picture of near panic and chaos, as MI5 struggled to cope with an avalanche of intelligence at the outbreak of war.